I just want to explain something from the start. I am not talking here about people putting up a hobby development website. They can put their small website anywhere they want. Even .dev. If .dev seems “new” and “hip” at the moment they can use .dev.

But WHY??? It makes absolutely no sense!

You think everyone is going to create a new website now because .dev came out? Where have they been for the past 20 years? Why didn’t they built a website last year? Do you think they are just going to move their website to .dev or leave some free account? Guess again.

Anyway, I am mostly talking about people putting serious money on .dev domains and/or serious money on developing a website/business solely on a .dev domain. And I am talking about people that invest in .dev domains. Sorry if I insulted you. If you came here for “polite” stuff then you came to the wrong blog. This is just business. And the truth.

First of all “dev” means nothing. I don’t see it associated with development or software development or technology. Name one person (excluding people named Dev!) that uses it in everyday life! I searched google for dev and I get little about software development. Do you just buy them because Google said that .dev is for everything about software? Are you the victim of all the (oldest) marketing tricks?

We already have .software, .tech and .technology and a few others. And we have .com, .net and .org and others for many many years. These are WAY more than enough for anyone to find a space. .Dev is almost as stupid as the .onl extension. Yeah, a company that thought that .online would be expensive applied for a .onl extension. There are 4,398 .onl domains today, 5 years after .onl launched.

I think that people are putting too much weight on the fact that Google is the registry of .dev. Just like they did with .app. So what if Google is the registry? This means nothing! Google will not make worthless domains more valuable. There are zero good .dev domains. ZERO. ZE-RO.

I would not even develop a website on .dev given the track record that Google has on abandoning failed projects. And why would I develop on .dev? Someone give me one reason! Just because it is “new” and “hip”? Who cares? I would prefer to build on old and proven.

I think people are so stupid that if Google was backing .onl then the extension would now have 50,000 registrations. Again there would be zero good .onl domains. I would hear “.ONL is the new gold!!!”.

There are very few good domains per new extension and these are either reserved or premiums. Some were lucky to get a few deals in some launches. Some people including myself got a few in 2014-2015. Those days are long gone. I am talking about strong left-right combinations like credit.cards or bitcoin.cash or similar. And even those are really hard to sell!

If .app had maybe 100-200 good domains (all reserved or premiums or gone in the first day of EAP) then .dev has none. Yes, bitcoin.dev is a worthless domain. And someone paid $12,500 for it. Others paid $12,500 for quite a few domains and many lesser fees in the EAP. This does not make the domains valuable. These are mostly vanity purchases from people that have too much money to spend and have no idea about domains. There are no similar sales coming in .dev and if there are a couple that would be the outliers.

If you are hoping to get a similar sale on your .dev domains (because I see domainers bought a few) then you are into sick gambling. You are better off buying lottery tickets.

.Dev is getting close to 100,000 domain registrations just like .app has about 370,000 registrations according to namestat.org. So what? Registrations most of the times mean absolutely nothing in New Extensions in terms of sales/prices or else .icu or .ooo would be the next big things with hundreds of sales. Very very few extensions are doing consistently good in sales. I can only think of .club at this moment.

Where are all the .app domain name sales people were expecting after May 2018? It is almost 1 year since the .app launch. Check Sold.Domains to see how many .app domains have sold. There are 8 sales. Maybe there are a few unreported ones but people were expecting hundreds of domain sales.

If you think developers are going to pay anything above $10 to buy your worthless .dev domain then you better think again.

There are not even that many ****dev.com sales. There are only 4 sales above $5k:

Finally I can only laugh at people saying the Google is going to throw marketing dollars at .dev and make it the next big thing. And even if they did (and that actually “worked” somehow”) why would they pick such a bad extension almost no one except geeks has any interest about???

BTW, countless companies have thrown billions of marketing dollars on something that works already: .com.

Also, Alexa rankings a week after an extension launches mean nothing (they don’t mean much anyway) and NO Google will not rank better .dev websites. (And rank them for what??? “Dev”?)

About Konstantinos Zournas

Konstantinos studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London and lives in Athens, Greece. He loves domains and building websites. He is online since 1995, learned about html in 1996 and got into domains in 2002. He started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

Agreed in most parts Konstantinos except for the use of the word Dev. In San Francisco I talk with a lot of other startup founders, investors, and have friends that work for LinkedIn, Google, etc. They all use the word Dev all the time, it’s probably the most common word used to describe developers.

I hear people say, “we’re hiring more devs” or “I’m trying to become a dev” all the time.

As for .DEV as a domain extension, yup – good pick for hobbyists, not for Domainers, and I don’t think any big companies are going to be rushing to get one. Google owning and marketing the heck out of the TLD is definitely driving the registrations.

I wouldn’t say it’s just .DEV domains that are for idiots, I’d broaden it to say that “most new gTLDs are for idiots” since I think the logic you put together here applies to the vast majority of new gTLDs.

As always, great article and I agree with 99% of what you’ve said here…now if only we got to discuss this live at NamesCon this year, not the same without you my friend!

I would ONLY use .dev domain for a staging site, or under-development site/project. But then .xyz (and other new crap TLDs) are available for $0.99 or less with their promo, then no need to waste money on .dev even for a staging site!

Only a developer who wants to sell his services can properly use .dev domain, example: “Mike.dev”, but again if I wanna hire a serious web developer, I would rather visit a site which has professional, credible domain like: “MikeWebDeveloper.com”

I think .dev is for personal or project-based using, not for investment. But people got it wrong and invested in it. They registered over 80k domain name in one or two days.https://dofo.com/search/?extension=dev